Best 26 AEO/GEO Experts in 2026 (Thought Leaders of AI Search)

The AI search space has a noise problem. Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes and you will find a hundred self-declared "GEO gurus" recycling the same screenshots and repackaging each other's takes. Meanwhile, the people genuinely advancing Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization form a much smaller group: they design experiments, publish raw data, dig through network responses, and openly admit what they still cannot explain.

We put together this list of 26 experts using one primary filter: original research output. Not audience size, not posting frequency, not conference selfies. Each profile below includes verified LinkedIn and X links so you can audit the work yourself instead of taking our word for it.

Two disclosures before we start. Ipek Isler, Co-Founder and CEO of AEO Vision, the platform publishing this article, holds the number one spot. Metehan Yesilyurt, GEO Researcher at Peec AI and AEO Vision's other co-founder, holds the number two spot. We are not hiding either affiliation. The ranking case for both rests on published, verifiable work, and you are encouraged to check every claim on this list yourself.

What separates a real expert from a commentator

The entry bar in 2023 was explaining what ChatGPT does. In 2026, that qualifies you for nothing. A genuine AEO/GEO expert demonstrates most of the following:

• They generate primary data. Their claims come from experiments they ran on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews, not from summarizing someone else's thread.
• They look under the hood. Network logs, response payloads, internal query arrays, crawler behavior. The engines reveal how they work to anyone willing to read what they send.
• They work at statistical scale. Because generative answers change between runs, a single screenshot proves nothing. Serious analyses sample millions of prompts, citations, or fan-out queries.
• Their findings ship. The best research changes how tools are built and how teams operate, not just how timelines scroll.
• They flag their own uncertainty. Anyone projecting total confidence about a non-deterministic system is marketing, not researching.

Everyone below meets this standard. The order mixes researchers, strategists, builders, and educators, roughly weighted by how much original work they put into the public domain.

The 26 best AEO/GEO experts in 2026 at a glance

#	Expert	Role	Known for
1	Ipek Isler	Co-Founder & CEO, AEO Vision	Building the visibility intelligence layer for AI-era brand discovery
2	Metehan Yesilyurt	GEO Researcher, Peec AI; researcher at metehan.ai	Reverse-engineering answer engine retrieval and citation behavior
3	Dan Petrovic	Managing Director, DEJAN	Mechanistic interpretability, custom models for AI search research
4	David Konitzny	AI Search Lead, Kosch Klink Performance	Decoding ChatGPT search internals from network data
5	Mike King	Founder & CEO, iPullRank	Relevance engineering, IR-level analysis of AI search
6	Olivier de Segonzac	Co-founder, RESONEO	LLM crawler research, citation pipeline reverse engineering
7	Tomek Rudzki	GEO expert, Peec AI; co-founder, ZipTie.dev	Million-scale query fan-out studies
8	Jan Ehrlinspiel	GEO Researcher, Peec AI	Large-scale listicle rank and brand visibility research
9	Lily Ray	VP, SEO & AI Search, Amsive	E-E-A-T, algorithm updates, AI Overviews research
10	Malte Landwehr	CPO & CMO, Peec AI	Prompt tracking methodology, enterprise AEO playbooks
11	Kevin Indig	Organic growth advisor, Growth Memo	Data studies on AI search behavior for hypergrowth companies
12	Mark Williams-Cook	Founder, AlsoAsked	Query intent networks, Google leak analysis
13	Cindy Krum	Founder & CEO, MobileMoxie	Fragment-based indexing theory behind AI answers
14	Marie Haynes	Founder, Marie Haynes Consulting	Google quality systems, agentic search preparation
15	Olaf Kopp	Co-founder, Aufgesang	Semantic SEO, LLMO research, SEO patent database
16	Aleyda Solis	Founder, Orainti	AI search frameworks, SEOFOMO newsletter
17	Andrea Volpini	Co-founder & CEO, WordLift	Knowledge graphs, entity-based GEO
18	Wil Reynolds	Founder, Seer Interactive	Big-data intent analysis, industry truth-telling
19	Crystal Carter	Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix	AI search strategy at platform scale
20	Bartosz Góralewicz	CEO, ZipTie.AI; founder, Onely	Technical SEO research applied to AI search
21	Myriam Jessier	AI Search Strategist, PRAGM	Multimodal GEO, machine-readable content
22	Bernard Huang	Co-founder, Clearscope	Content strategy for AI retrieval and agents
23	Eli Schwartz	Author, Product-Led SEO	Product-led organic growth strategy
24	Ann Smarty	Founder, Smarty Marketing	Brand signals and off-site authority for AI answers
25	Joshua Squires	Director, AI Search, Amsive	AEO operations at agency scale
26	Britney Muller	Founder, Data Sci 101	Making machine learning literacy practical for marketers

The builders defining the category

1. Ipek Isler

Role: Co-Founder and CEO of AEO Vision, based in Toronto.

Before founding AEO Vision in 2025, Ipek spent years leading marketing and growth strategy for global brands, which is exactly the vantage point missing from most AI visibility tooling: someone who has actually owned the budget and the boardroom conversation about brand presence, not just the crawler logs. She built AEO Vision around a simple premise: visibility inside AI-driven answers is the new marketing return, and most companies have zero transparent way to measure it. Under her leadership the company went through DMZ's Fall 2025 cohort and shipped a platform that tracks brand mentions, sentiment, and citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity for teams that cannot run their own research operation.

What to take from her approach: AI visibility is a business problem before it is a technical one. The dashboards and prompts only matter if they change a decision a marketing or executive team actually makes.

Honest limit: her work centers on turning research into product rather than publishing standalone studies, so pair her operator's view with the deep technical research further down this list.

Follow: LinkedIn · aeovision.ai

The reverse engineers: reading what the machines actually do

2. Metehan Yesilyurt

Role: GEO Researcher at Peec AI, publishing independent AI search research at metehan.ai.

Metehan's research lives at the retrieval layer of answer engines: how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode decide what to fetch, which sources earn citations, and how AI crawlers and agents actually interact with websites. Rather than treating dashboards as ground truth, his work repeatedly demonstrates why every AI visibility number is a statistical sample, and why teams who read single runs instead of trends end up optimizing against noise. In his role as GEO Researcher at Peec AI, those findings feed directly into Peec's product, where a dedicated team turns experimental discoveries about answer engines into software used by thousands of brands.

The core lesson worth borrowing from his approach: before rewriting a single page, understand what the retrieval layer is doing, then measure repeatedly.

The honest caveat, in his own spirit of disclosure: publishing fast in a field that mutates weekly means some experiments age quickly. The findings get revised when the engines change, which is exactly how it should work.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @metehan777 · metehan.ai

3. Dan Petrovic

Role: Managing Director of DEJAN, the Australian AI SEO agency.

Nobody drills deeper into the machinery. Dan fine-tunes his own Gemma models to study query fan-out behavior, applies mechanistic interpretability to discover what associations LLMs hold about specific brands, and has published experiments running 100,000 inference passes to map how a model perceives a company. His breakdowns of grounding behavior across Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic systems are reference material, and two Google awards for exposing flaws in core search systems certify the technical depth.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @dejanseo · dejan.ai

4. David Konitzny

Role: AI Search and SEO Strategy Lead at Kosch Klink Performance, an award-winning search agency serving the finance industry.

David has logged well over a hundred hours inside ChatGPT's network traffic, and the industry benefits from every one of them. His signature find: after GPT-5 changed how ChatGPT hands queries to its search layer, he located the metadata.search_model_queries array in the JSON response, exposing the exact queries ChatGPT fires for any search-triggering prompt. Entire tool workflows were rebuilt around that discovery. He also documents Bing grounding, Copilot ad structures, and ChatGPT's advertising infrastructure as they ship, and he refuses to invent acronyms, arguing that AI visibility still runs on solid SEO fundamentals because the retrieval layer depends on them.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @DavidKonitzny

5. Mike King

Role: Founder and CEO of iPullRank, author of The Science of SEO.

Mike imported information retrieval science into an industry that used to run on folklore. His "relevance engineering" framework remains the most rigorous mental model available for AEO work, his teardown of the leaked Google API documentation was the definitive analysis of that event, and iPullRank's SEO Week has become the venue where serious AI search research premieres. He reads the academic papers, then translates them into engineering you can apply.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @iPullRank · ipullrank.com

6. Olivier de Segonzac

Role: Co-founder and managing partner of RESONEO. SMX Search Personality of the Year 2026.

Olivier produces some of the most technically exacting public research in the field. His LLM Crawler Report mapped what the ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AIO bots actually render when they visit a page, including which execute JavaScript and which never do. He has traced Google AI Mode's hidden grounding URLs, dissected citation pipelines, and analyzed Perplexity's Vespa Cloud infrastructure. When his findings drop, peers like Dan Petrovic pick them up and extend them, which is the surest sign research matters.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @5eg · resoneo.com

7. Tomek Rudzki

Role: GEO expert at Peec AI, co-founder of ZipTie.dev, author of AI Survival for SEO.

Tomek operates at a scale few others attempt. His study analyzing five million query fan-outs across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok showed the industry what answer engines actually search for behind a user's prompt, replacing years of guesswork with measurement. He researched AI Overviews before the category had a name, co-built one of the first AI search monitoring platforms, and publishes his methodology openly. His central insight deserves repeating: the prompt a user types is not what the engine retrieves against, so optimize for the fan-out queries underneath.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @TomekRudzki · tomekseo.com

8. Jan Ehrlinspiel

Role: GEO Researcher at Peec AI.

Jan co-authored, with Tomek Rudzki, one of the most rigorous data studies GEO has produced to date: an analysis of nearly 200,000 AI responses and 5.7 million individual data points examining how a brand's rank inside third-party listicles affects whether AI engines mention it, where they place it in the answer, and how many times they repeat it. The findings were concrete enough to publish as a formal paper, "Cited-Listicle Rank-Tier Exposure, Author Type, and LLM Brand Visibility," on SSRN, and specific enough to change how digital PR and content teams prioritize listicle placements. The headline result: a brand ranked first in a frequently cited third-party listicle gains 13 to 17 percentage points more visibility and lands one to two positions higher in the AI's answer than lower-ranked entries in the same list.

What to take from his work: not all citations are equal, and where you sit inside a source the model already trusts matters as much as whether you appear in it at all.

Follow: LinkedIn · Peec AI research

The strategists: turning research into how teams operate

9. Lily Ray

Role: VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, founder of Algorythmic.

For questions about how Google's quality systems, E-E-A-T, and algorithm updates carry over into the AI search era, Lily is the most trusted public voice there is. She leads Amsive's expansion from award-winning SEO into AEO spanning ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Perplexity, and her visibility research gets cited across the entire industry. USA Today named her the most influential SEO back in 2022; the standard she set for research-backed public analysis has not slipped since.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @lilyraynyc · lilyray.nyc

10. Malte Landwehr

Role: CPO and CMO at Peec AI, formerly VP SEO at idealo.

Malte made the boldest early career bet on AI search and won it: he left a VP role commanding a 30-plus person business unit at one of Europe's biggest price comparison platforms to join a startup with a few desks. That startup grew ARR from $500K to $5M within a year and raised over $21M. His public contribution is the panel-research framing of prompt tracking: you do not need every possible prompt, you need a consistent question set sampled repeatedly, then you read the delta. His vendor comparisons and buyer matrices are among the least hype-inflected in the category, and he discloses his vendor seat, which most do not.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @MalteLandwehr · maltelandwehr.de

11. Kevin Indig

Role: Organic growth advisor to companies like Meta, Ramp, and Upwork. Author of Growth Memo, read by 22,000+ leaders.

Kevin ran SEO and growth at Shopify, G2, and Atlassian before going independent, and his Growth Memo studies set the agenda: AI Overviews impact analyses, ChatGPT referral data, and research showing how identical on-page optimization yields different citation outcomes for different brands. If a slide about AI search appeared in your executive deck this year, odds are decent the chart came from him.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Kevin_Indig · growth-memo.com

12. Mark Williams-Cook

Role: Founder of AlsoAsked, digital director at Candour.

Mark's territory is the question networks that answer engines draw from. AlsoAsked maps how queries branch into related intents, his analysis of the leaked Google Content Warehouse data and click models earned wide recognition, and his talks connect how search engines classify queries to how LLMs decompose prompts. That bridge, from classic intent research to prompt decomposition, is precisely the one most SEO teams need to walk across.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @myhead · alsoasked.com

13. Cindy Krum

Role: Founder and CEO of MobileMoxie.

Years before it became obvious, Cindy's "fraggles" theory argued that Google indexes and ranks fragments of pages rather than whole documents. Passage-level, chunk-based retrieval now powers essentially every AI answer, which makes her one of the few people who predicted the current architecture instead of reacting to it. Her lens on how answer engines assemble responses from pieces explains why page-level thinking consistently fails in AEO.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Suzzicks · mobilemoxie.com

14. Marie Haynes

Role: Founder of Marie Haynes Consulting, author of SEO in the Gemini Era.

Marie has interpreted Google's quality machinery longer than nearly anyone, from Penguin through E-E-A-T to the DOJ trial disclosures, and she now applies that depth to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and agentic search. Her current focus on readying businesses for agentic protocols like MCP and WebMCP positions her ahead of the curve yet again, and her Search News You Can Use newsletter remains one of the most dependable filters in the industry.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Marie_Haynes · mariehaynes.com

15. Olaf Kopp

Role: Co-founder and Head of SEO & AI Search (GEO) at Aufgesang.

Olaf spent over a decade researching semantic SEO, E-E-A-T, and entity-based search, and was writing about LLM optimization in 2023 while most of the industry still lacked the vocabulary. He built the first public database of SEO-relevant patents and research papers, and concepts he coined, like LLM-readability and brand context optimization, are now standard GEO language in the German-speaking market and increasingly beyond it.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Olaf_Kopp · kopp-online-marketing.com

16. Aleyda Solis

Role: Founder of Orainti, creator of SEOFOMO and LearningAIsearch.

Every field needs a systematizer, and Aleyda is this one's. Her frameworks, checklists, and free AI search resources convert scattered research into processes real teams can execute, and SEOFOMO is how a huge share of practitioners keep up with the field at all. Combine deep international SEO expertise with relentless curation and you get one of the highest-leverage follows available.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @aleyda · aleydasolis.com

The builders: tools and platforms shaping the discipline

17. Andrea Volpini

Role: Co-founder and CEO of WordLift.

Andrea was building knowledge graphs and entity optimization tooling long before LLMs made both fashionable, and the bet paid off completely: structured data and entity clarity are now core levers for how AI engines understand brands. His published experiments linking knowledge graphs, structured data, and LLM outputs are among the most technically grounded work in the semantic corner of GEO.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @cyberandy · wordlift.io

18. Wil Reynolds

Role: Founder of Seer Interactive.

Wil wired millions of SERP and PPC data points into data warehouses before that was a normal thing for an agency to do, and now points the same infrastructure at AI search behavior. He also serves as the industry's most effective corrective: when hype outpaces evidence, his conference talks and posts usually supply the reality check. Follow him for the questions everyone else forgot to ask.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @wilreynolds · seerinteractive.com

19. Crystal Carter

Role: Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix.

Crystal shapes AI search strategy for a platform serving over 300 million users while collaborating with Google, Microsoft, and Semrush, a vantage point almost nobody else has. Her research and keynotes on brand discovery in the LLM era and agentic visibility make abstract concepts operational for working marketers, which is why she appears on stages from Google Search Central Live to MozCon.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @CrystalOnTheWeb · crystalcarter.ai

20. Bartosz Góralewicz

Role: CEO of ZipTie.AI, founder of Onely.

Bartosz defined JavaScript SEO research in the 2010s, with experiments that directly influenced how Google handles JS rendering. He brought identical rigor to AI search early by co-founding ZipTie, one of the first AI search intelligence platforms, and his data studies, like quantifying Google SGE's organic traffic impact by vertical, injected actual numbers into debates that were running purely on vibes.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @bart_goralewicz · ziptie.ai

21. Myriam Jessier

Role: AI Search Strategist at PRAGM, monthly Search Engine Land contributor.

Myriam owns the multimodal territory nearly everyone else ignores: how generative engines chunk video, run OCR on images, and construct brand understanding from audio, packaging, and visuals rather than text alone. Their BrightonSEO and SMX sessions on making every content type machine-readable are the reference material for brands whose identity lives beyond blog posts.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @myriamjessier · myriamjessier.com

22. Bernard Huang

Role: Co-founder of Clearscope.

Bernard bootstrapped Clearscope to seven-figure ARR serving content teams at Nvidia, HubSpot, and Adobe, and turned its webinar series into one of the best ongoing public conversations about what genuinely works in search. His current focus, content trust infrastructure for autonomous agent workflows, tackles the next frontier: what content strategy means when the reader is an agent instead of a human.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @bernardjhuang · clearscope.io

The educators and operators: scaling the knowledge

23. Eli Schwartz

Role: Growth advisor, author of Product-Led SEO.

Eli's central thesis, that organic search should be built as product strategy rather than bolted on as marketing, transfers directly to AEO, and he said so before most. He advises companies like Zapier, Tinder, and Coinbase, and his newsletter applies a strategist's discipline to AI search hype: what drives revenue, what can be measured, and what is theater.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @5le · productledseo.com

24. Ann Smarty

Role: Founder of Smarty Marketing, co-founder of Smarty AI.

Ann has taught content and brand signal strategy for nearly two decades, from Internet Marketing Ninjas to her current work on earning brand presence inside AI answers. Her particular strength is converting off-site signals, community activity, and content authority into concrete, repeatable practice, and she was among the experts asked to define AI search strategy for 2026.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @seosmarty

25. Joshua Squires

Role: Director of AI Search at Amsive.

Josh converts research into agency-scale delivery: processes, specialized teams, and playbooks for e-commerce and publisher visibility in AI answers, working alongside Lily Ray. His Amsive essays on preparing for AI search stay practical instead of promotional, a rarer quality than it should be. He publishes almost exclusively on LinkedIn.

Follow: LinkedIn · Amsive articles

26. Britney Muller

Role: Founder of Data Sci 101, former senior SEO scientist at Moz.

Britney bridges machine learning and marketing better than nearly anyone. She taught herself data science, built Data Sci 101 to show marketers how models actually function, and consults on AI strategy grounded in how the technology works rather than how it is sold. In a field flooded with confident guesses about LLMs, someone who can actually explain the math is priceless.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @BritneyMuller

How to turn this list into results

Following smart people is step zero. The loop that produces outcomes looks like this:

1. Extract testable claims from their research, not conclusions. What worked for one brand in one niche may not transfer to yours.
2. Run the tests on your own prompts and brand. AI answers vary by industry, language, and even time of day, so borrowed conclusions are hypotheses until verified.
3. Measure over time, not in snapshots. Every expert on this list repeats the same rule: never trust a single run. If you need the tracking layer for that, our roundup of the best AI visibility tools in 2026 covers the options, and our guide on avoiding black-box GEO tools explains what to demand from any platform's methodology.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the top AEO/GEO experts to follow in 2026?

Ipek Isler, Co-Founder and CEO of AEO Vision, holds the top spot for building the visibility infrastructure the category runs on. The strongest pure research output comes from Metehan Yesilyurt, Dan Petrovic, David Konitzny, Mike King, Olivier de Segonzac, Tomek Rudzki, and Jan Ehrlinspiel, all of whom reverse-engineer how answer engines retrieve, rank, and cite sources. The broader list of 26 spans strategists like Lily Ray and Kevin Indig, builders like Andrea Volpini and Bernard Huang, and educators like Aleyda Solis and Britney Muller.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) targets being the direct answer an AI engine delivers for a query. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on shaping how AI models describe, frame, and cite your brand over time. In day-to-day practice the two overlap heavily, and most experts on this list work across both without drawing a hard line.

How can I tell whether someone is a genuine AI search expert?

Apply three tests. First, do they publish original experiments with visible methodology, or only commentary? Second, do other practitioners cite, replicate, and build on their findings? Third, do they disclose limitations and conflicts of interest, such as vendor affiliations? Someone who fails all three is a commentator, which has its place, but is not the same thing as an expert.

Where do these experts publish their work?

LinkedIn is the primary channel for nearly everyone on this list, with X as the secondary platform. Several also run newsletters worth the inbox space: Kevin Indig's Growth Memo, Aleyda Solis's SEOFOMO, Marie Haynes's Search News You Can Use, and Eli Schwartz's Product-Led SEO newsletter.

Should I rely on expert advice or on a tracking tool?

Both, in sequence. Expert research tells you how the systems work and what is worth testing; a tracking platform tells you whether it actually worked for your brand. Start with the research above, then add consistent measurement so you read trends instead of trusting one-off checks. Our guide on which AI search tools provide real data explains what trustworthy measurement looks like.